Controversies around attempts to change the content and orientation of school textbooks, especially those produced by government institutions are nothing new in India. It happens almost every time there is a change in government, especially across the ideological divide. In fact, one is surprised that even after three years and change of the BJP coming to power, the fully revised school textbooks from NCERT have not yet been released. It is a matter of speculation and concern for many as to what is cooking inside the NCERT, the nodal agency for producing textbooks that crores of school children across the country have to read. The current controversy around the Battle of Haldighati that has cropped up in the BJP-governed state of Rajasthan may provide us with an indication of things to come.

The Controversy

There is something bizarre about the initiative to bring about change in the history textbooks of Class X as well as the MA (History) syllabus of Rajasthan University. In February 2017, BJP MLA Mohan Lal Gupta–also a government nominee in the Rajasthan University’s syndicate–proposed that history curriculum and books should be revised to convey that the Rajput ruler Maharana Pratap of Mewar won the battle of Haldighati against the Mughal ruler Akbar’s forces. (The established view until now holds that Mughals chased away the Rajput forces led by the Rana of Mewar, though they failed to capture Pratap.) The proposal found immediate public backing from three ministers of the Rajasthan government including the then-Higher Education Minister and the School Education Minister, Kalicharan Saraf and Vasudev Devnani, respectively.

The RU’s Board of Studies, which consists of educrats and academicians, has now inserted a new topic – ‘Debate on the Outcome of the Battle of Haldighati’ – in the second semester curriculum of the Master’s course in History. A book titled Rashtra Ratna Maharana Pratap has been helpfully added to the list of suggested readings, which reportedly presents ‘new research’ to argue that Rana Pratap succeeded in holding on to Mewar in the face of Mughal invasion.

The author of Rashtra Ratna Maharana Pratap, Chandra Shekhar Sharma, also scripted the change in the Class X school textbook, which now asserts that “the victory of the Mughal forces was not certified”. The controversial chapter goes on to note:

“Neither was the battle of Haldighati inconclusive nor was it won by Akbar. In fact, Pratap who was defending his motherland succeeded in his objective while Mughal emperor Akbar’s forces, having imperialistic ambition, failed in taking over Mewar.”

When sections of the media questioned the current Higher Education Minister of Rajasthan on the issue, he is reported to have declared that “Maharana Pratap was the first freedom fighter and limiting him to any one political party is not right.”

So, who won the Battle of Haldighati? And why is it important?

It is true that Mughal forces failed to capture Maharana Pratap. But it is also true that the Mewar ruler had a difficult time after Haldighati and could not function as a sovereign operating out of the royal palace. Even the said textbooks do not deny this. Sharma alludes to the fact that the Rana continued to issue land deeds in certain areas till about 1580. However, this per se does not and cannot prove that the entire area he ruled over continued to be under his control or that his sovereign powers had not been severely dented to an extent that he could never recover from it. Declaring him to be victorious in the Battle of Haldighati would render meaningless all the local narratives and folk songs that celebrate his heroic struggles wandering about in the difficult terrain in a desperate attempt to re-gather his forces.

Yet, one would be missing the point if one stopped at declaring the ‘winner’ in the battle. Battles then, as battles now, were a messy affair. Non-specialists often tend to think of battles like football matches with clear winners and losers. What make armed conflicts meaningful in historical narratives are very often a different set of questions: What were the circumstances that led to the fight? What happened to the fighting parties after the battle? What were the stakes?

In other words, the more important questions concern the larger narrative around the conflict. Thus, at one level the present attempt on part of the official historians of Rajasthan to put forth a counter fact at one level is absurd. It amounts to an ostensibly childish insistence on demanding a retrospective victory on behalf of a protagonist (Maharana Pratap in this case) that they closely and exclusively identify themselves with. This is where the crucial issues emerge.

Doesn’t modern historiography celebrate multiple histories? So what is the problem?

It is a truism of modern craft of history writing, indeed of all established practices of professional histories in all times and cultures in some senses, that history should never be singular and that multiple narratives must flourish. It is equally true that politics of present does always affect our understanding of past. Why then should there be a problem in accepting another perspective on the Mughal-Mewar conflict? There are two important issues at stake in this controversy that need to be addressed:

(1) The desirability of multiple histories does not and should not mean that we peddle fanciful accounts of pasts with no basis in the sources. Historians must exercise due diligence in examining a diverse variety of sources within their given contexts before offering a conclusion. Getting one’s facts right is just the very elementary aspect of it.

The real issue then is not about handing over the trophy to the actual winners. The problem is the attempt by an elected government to yoke national pride as well as Rajput glory exclusively with the ruler of Mewar. Let us not forget that the battle of Haldighati, like almost all premodern battles, were fought by rulers whose sole objective was to amass dynastic fortunes and establish powerful kingdoms. They differed in the extent of their territorial expanse, military strength and/or religious affiliations. Both the Maharana of Mewar and the Mughal Emperor Akbar were ultimately eying the agrarian surplus and trade dues that they could obtain if they succeeded in controlling the territories they were fighting for. This in turn would help them patronize their ministers and military commanders and strengthen their war machines. Neither of them were saviours of their subjects. And neither claimed to rule in the name of the ‘nation’. A state that rules in the interest of a nation (or at least in its name) is what we know of as a nation-state – a political entity that came into being much later with onset on modernity. To describe Maharana Pratap as a freedom fighter (in the sense in which Bhagat Singh was a freedom fighter against the colonial regime) is to commit an anachronism. There is no doubt that he fought with courage and aplomb a force that was numerically and technologically superior to his own. But like all medieval dynasts, he was fighting for narrow political gains. There is no evidence to suggest that the subjects were any better or worse in any of the Rajput principalities where the Mughal court instituted itself as a check over the local ruler’s authority.

(2) The attempts at cultivating national pride through historically misleading narratives are dubious at best as they actually frame the nation itself in narrow and exclusive ways. For, narratives like these ride over the presumed subtext of a Hindu-Muslim conflict. The right wing ideologues elaborate this subtext with an acute eye for who the audience are. Sophisticated interlocutors from the Sangh Parivar speaking on English news channels skirt the issue and present a convoluted discourse on multiple perspectives and alternative facticities. The district level party workers and WhatsApp school of right wing historiography on the other hand churn out completely fictitious and venomous accounts of Hindu-Muslim conflicts in the medieval period. BJP politicians both inside and outside the parliament and state assemblies routinely refer to “thousand years of servitude” [hazar saal ki ghulami] in an attempt to paint the British colonialists and ‘Muslim’ rulers in the same brush, often without specifying it in as many words.

It is true that all premodern states were oppressive including all the ‘Muslim-ruled’ states. The exploitative character of states like those of the Delhi Sultanate, Palas, Pratiharas, Cholas or the Mughals was highlighted by a number of historians in the last fifty years – so much so that it is no longer a subject of interest to most scholars. Yet, none of the Muslim ruling dynasties in India functioned like a colonial government in so much as they did not pass on resources to another land. Nor did they benefit only their own co-religionists. Sometimes, they would make such claims under specific contingencies but the reports of their policies almost never appear to be discriminatory. Rulers – Muslims as well as Hindus – were even-handed in their ruthless collection of taxes from peasants of all religions. The medieval ruling elites – invariably drawn eclectically from different religions – did not take sides on the basis of which religion they practiced. They chose their friends and foes rather opportunistically – not very differently from our own ruling elites who transform overnight from being fighters against communal forces to crusaders against corruption. Hakim Khan Sur was the most prominent military commander for the Rana of Mewar in Haldighati fighting one of the most trusted Mughal commanders, Man Singh. Almost all major clans of Rajputs, other than those from Mewar, referred to the Mughals as a distinct clan of Rajputs with whom they established marital ties – giving away their daughters as per the established convention wherein a clan with superior political status only received (and never gave away) daughters in marriage.

If our political subject positions affect our attitude to historical problems, there should be some space for the professional historian too to participate in the battles about contending historical narratives. The question one is left with is this: What kind of nation do our political classes and do we, the people of India, stand for?

An example from the world of cricket – the other modern battleground in South Asia for contending conceptions of nation – may illustrate the problem. In the presentation ceremony after the final match of the first T-20 World Cup in South Africa in September 2007, when the captain of the losing side Shoaib Malik was called upon to say a few words, he began his speech by saying sorry to all the Muslims from all over the world and assured them that his team gave their best. Implicit in the comment was an uncanny identification whereby he assumed that the India-Pakistan contest was somehow to be seen as a contest between Muslims and non-Muslims. Irfan Pathan from the Indian team was the Man of the Match in the game and one of the persons responsible for India’s dream-run in the series was Yusuf Pathan. The irony of it obviously did not dawn on poor Malik. But then, the shaky foundations of Pakistani nationalism stand on an equally restrictive history. India as a nation, built as it is on a different set of principles, can ill afford to take that course.